Dream City: It’s Time to Reimagine San Francisco
Each day brings news of Big Tech’s exodus from San Francisco. Yesterday it was Salesforce — the city’s biggest private employer and dominatrix of the downtown skyline with its gleaming dildo in the sky — that announced it too was joining the shift to remote work, telling most of its employees they can continue to bang away at their keyboards from home, even after the pandemic. Tech brands like Yelp, Twitter and Dropbox have also downsized their SF offices or shut them completely, with city office vacancy soaring to nearly 18 percent. This trend has the San Francisco Chronicle, which has become more of a real estate player than a newspaper, all aflutter. In today’s frantic front-page story about the Salesforce decision, reporter Roland Li interviewed only big business types, who predictably predict doom and gloom — falling employment, shrinking tax bases, etc. etc. Li didn’t rouse himself to interview ONE local political official, community leader, social worker, longtime resident — not ANYONE whose life has been disrupted by the tech invasion of the past decade.
The Chronicle and its sister organization, the Chamber of Commerce, might be having nightmares about the corporate tech outflow from San Francisco. (“The Bay Area’s status as the premier tech hub is in doubt,” frets anguished reporter Li.) But for most of us longtime San Franciscans, this is the silver lining in the plague. Emptied of many of its tech workers — who tended to work in bubble environments and contributed little to the life of the city — San Francisco now seems less crunched and, well, creepy. The robotic work force that suddenly poured into the city after the late Mayor Ed Lee’s disastrous Twitter tax break in 2011 succeeded in forcing thousands of solid San Franciscans out of their homes and creating a gaping wealth gap. And now as the techies flee the urban wreckage they caused — to Austin or Portland or Charlottesville or wherever they and their laptops call home — San Francisco can breathe a sigh of relief. And begin to reinvent itself.
To remake San Francisco, we shouldn’t rely on SPUR, SF.citi, the Chronicle editorial board or any of the other corporate brain trusts. As I’ve been arguing, we need to convene the broadest and most diverse array of local citizens in order to rebuild a truly livable city.
Speaking of which, I’m enjoying Spirits of San Francisco, the new book by my friend and former Salon colleague Gary Kamiya. The book, which is evocatively illustrated by local artist Paul Madonna, offers walking destinations (some familiar, many off-the-beaten-path) throughout our glorious city by the sea. In his Preface, Gary presents a city in lockdown, largely devoid of its usual bustle. In some great cities — like New York, he observes — the plague’s empty streets have a haunting, ghost-town effect. But in a city as beautiful and self-contained as San Francisco, the emptiness inflames the imagination. “In San Francisco, a deserted street seems to open a window to the place’s deepest heart… Every street is already a de Chirico.”
As San Francisco blessedly loses some of its corporate octane, let’s use this transition period wisely to dream the city we want to live and work and play in. A city whose human creativity matches its natural splendor.
You can buy Spirits of San Francisco here.
